Fog, Fear and the Reconquest of Europe

A City That Kept Its Fog and Found Its Crown

Milan in the winter of 1989 still wore its fog like an old scarf, wound twice around the Navigli and tucked under the chin of the Duomo, and beneath that scarf the city was changing faster than it liked to admit. Silvio Berlusconi had owned the football club since 1986, and the club had become — nobody bothered to pretend otherwise — a pillar of his swelling media empire, polished, broadcast and served to the public like the risotto of the house: saffron-gold, unmistakably Milanese, and suddenly plated for export. Italian football that year was the richest and most watched in the world, the whole peninsula ironing its tablecloths for the World Cup it would host in 1990, and into this prosperous, preening theatre walked a Milan side that would finish the year holding nearly everything a football club can hold.

The mind of the operation belonged to Arrigo Sacchi, a manager who treated the pitch as a good engineer treats a river — not something to admire, something to direct. His Milan pressed high up the field, defended with a line pushed forward like advancing infantry, and marked space rather than men: heresies, every one of them, in a country raised on the catechism of the deep defence. And behind the idea stood the men who made it flesh. Franco Baresi, captain and libero, read the game the way old farmers read the sky above the Alps; beside him grew the young Paolo Maldini; and ahead of them moved the three Dutchmen — Ruud Gullit, Marco van Basten and Frank Rijkaard, the last arrived in 1988 from Sporting Lisbon to complete the trio as a third leg completes a stool. It is a rare thing when theory and talent sit down at the same table. In 1989 they shared every course.

The Night Belgrade Held Its Breath

Every triumph worth the telling begins with a fright, and this one began in fog — not the maternal, domestic fog of Lombardy but the hostile fog of Belgrade, which on 9 November 1988 swallowed the Marakana whole and forced the abandonment of a European Cup second-round tie that Milan, a goal down at the moment of reprieve, had been losing on merit. The match was replayed the next day, 10 November, and it was in the replay that Roberto Donadoni, the winger with the honest tradesman's face, met a collision so sickening that he dropped to the turf unconscious, his jaw shattered, his airway blocked, his life narrowing to a thread. On the grass the masseur Angelo Pagani and the club doctor, Monti, fought to keep him from choking on his own tongue — by the accounts that survive, Pagani forced open the shattered jaw to free the airway while the doctor breathed for him — and Donadoni returned to consciousness in a Belgrade hospital, which is a hard city in which to wake when you cannot remember arriving.

Milan drew that replay 1-1, van Basten scoring, and passed through on penalties, 4-2. The chronicles record the collision as a challenge from Red Star's Goran Vasilijevic — elbow and head arriving together, as Sacchi himself later told it — and about what followed there is no quarrel at all. Donadoni recovered. Donadoni returned. Donadoni scored against Real Madrid in April and started the European Cup final in May, and so a man who in November had nearly lost everything lifted, six months later, the heaviest prize club football owns. The moralist notes that the game grants such symmetries rarely, and never on credit; Donadoni had paid in advance, and in full.

Five Strokes Against the Old Monarchy

The road to Barcelona was not all thunder. It had opened quietly enough against Vitosha of Sofia — a 2-0 first leg in the Bulgarian capital in September 1988, then a 5-2 return at San Siro in October, four of the five from van Basten — and after the Belgrade fright came a quarter-final against Werder Bremen conducted in the spirit of a chess adjournment: goalless in Germany, and settled at San Siro on 15 March 1989 by a single van Basten penalty — 1-0 across a hundred and eighty minutes. Great sides know how to win ugly. It is the tax they pay in advance for the nights on which they are permitted to win beautifully.

The beautiful night came on 19 April. Milan had drawn the semi-final first leg 1-1 at the Bernabeu, van Basten rising late to head the equaliser, and the president — a man who had learned in television that the public forgives everything except boredom — had reportedly demanded of his players a 5-0 in the return. Presidents demand many things and usually receive excuses. This team delivered the order to the digit. Before 73,112 at San Siro, Ancelotti opened in the 18th minute with a strike from distance, and then Rijkaard, Gullit, van Basten and Donadoni followed him to the scoresheet: five goals, five different scorers, Real Madrid — the old monarchy of the competition — dismissed 5-0 on the night and 6-1 on the aggregate. It was less a result than a lecture in five parts on what football was about to become, and all Europe took notes.

Barcelona, the Twenty-Fourth of May

And so to the Camp Nou, 24 May 1989, some 97,000 inside and the West German Karl-Heinz Tritschler holding the whistle. The opponents were Steaua Bucharest, Anghel Iordanescu's side, carrying Hagi, Lacatus and Piturca — no small inventory of talent. Sacchi sent out Galli in goal; Tassotti, Maldini, Colombo, Costacurta and the captain Baresi across the back; Donadoni, Rijkaard and Ancelotti through the middle; and ahead of them the two Dutchmen, Gullit and van Basten, riding forward like the twin prows of the same ship.

The two Dutchmen decided it between themselves, as if by private arrangement. Gullit struck in the 18th minute and again before the interval; van Basten scored in the 28th and then once more in the 46th, almost before the second half had drawn breath. Four goals, two apiece, 4-0: a final not so much won as pronounced, the way a court pronounces sentence. It was Milan's third European Cup and the first in twenty years — the previous one belonged to 1969 — and twenty years is a long fast for a city that measures itself against its own past as sternly as Milan does. The cup came home over the Alps, and the Madonnina, who sees everything from her spire and approves of very little, may be permitted to have smiled.

The Ledger at Home, Where the Accountant Frowns

Honesty compels the full entry in the ledger, and the domestic page is less flattering. Milan, the reigning champions of Italy, finished the 1988-89 Serie A in third place: 46 points from 16 wins, 14 draws and 4 defeats, 61 goals scored against a miserly 25 conceded. The scudetto crossed the city to Internazionale — Trapattoni's record side, armoured with Matthaus and Brehme — and there is no way of dressing that sentence for a Milanese table, so I serve it plain. Yet the spring told you where this team's heart truly lived: 4-0 over Como in mid-January, a 3-1 taken away from Rome a week later, 2-0 in Florence in February, then a 6-1 demolition of Pescara and, on 12 March, a 4-0 of Juventus — Juventus! — that read less like a scoreline than a manifesto. Fourteen draws are the fingerprint of a side rationing its lungs for Europe. The accountant frowns at such housekeeping; the historian, knowing what May would bring, signs off the books without complaint.

There was domestic silver all the same, and of a novel vintage. The first Supercoppa Italiana — champions against cup-holders, a fixture postponed out of 1988 by the congestion of an Olympic year — was finally staged at San Siro on 14 June 1989, and Sampdoria, through Vialli, had the impertinence to take the lead. Rijkaard replied, then Mannari, then van Basten: 3-1, and the first name ever engraved on the new trophy was Milan's, which felt then, and feels now, like the natural order of things.

The Harvest of December

The second half of 1989 was given over to the defence of everything, and it began briskly: the new championship opened on 27 August with a 3-0 win away at Cesena, the summer having returned Daniele Massaro from Roma and brought the young Marco Simone up from Como — provisions laid in for a long campaign, the way a Lombard house lays in wood before winter. The European Cup defence opened against HJK Helsinki, 4-0 in September and 1-0 a fortnight later, first steps on a road that would end the following May in back-to-back European Cups; but that harvest belongs to another chapter, and we shall not eat it before it ripens.

November and December brought the continental and then the planetary bookkeeping. Against Barcelona in the European Super Cup, Milan drew 1-1 at the Camp Nou on 23 November and won the return 1-0 at San Siro on 7 December, Alberico Evani scoring the goal that sealed the club's first Super Cup. Ten days later, in Tokyo's National Stadium before 60,228 souls, Milan met Atletico Nacional of Colombia, champions of the Libertadores, for the Intercontinental Cup, and the match ground deep into extra time, tight as a courtroom, until the 119th minute — when Evani, again Evani, the quiet clerk of Milan's December accounts, bent in a free-kick and was named man of the match. One-nil; world champions; and a footnote for the connoisseur: two trophies of two different continents settled in a single month by the same unassuming man.

And on 26 December, while the panettone was still on the table, came the year's last entry: Marco van Basten was awarded the Ballon d'Or, his second in succession after 1988, with a third still waiting for him in 1992. It crowned a 1988-89 season in which he had scored 33 goals in all competitions — 19 of them in the league, and ten in a European Cup campaign that no one out-scored. There are strikers who accumulate and strikers who compose; van Basten composed, and in 1989 all Europe was his manuscript.

The View from the Far Side of the World

A word, before the verdict, for the reader who follows the Diavolo from the far side of the planet. Distance, in any case, has never yet disqualified devotion. In that year of aerials and airmail the rossonero faith travelled wherever Italians had carried their suitcases. Those who kept vigil through the southern night, waiting on a crackle of radio for word from Barcelona, were present at the Camp Nou in every way that matters.

So enter it in the register, and rule the line beneath. In 1989 Milan won the European Cup, the European Super Cup, the Intercontinental Cup and the inaugural Supercoppa Italiana; surrendered the scudetto to the neighbours; and very nearly lost a winger to the Belgrade fog before winning half the world with him. A club that had waited twenty years for Europe took it back in ninety minutes and then refused to give anything else away for the rest of the year. That is not fortune, whatever the envious muttered over their espresso. Fortune wins you an evening. What Milan built in 1989 — the pressing, the line, the two Dutchmen at the prow and Baresi at the tiller — was architecture, and architecture, as this city of ours has always understood, is simply patience given a beautiful shape.